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Some of Microsoft's biggest investors want the company to pick a "turnaround expert" to succeed outgoing CEO Steve Ballmer, and Ford CEO Alan Mulally and CSC CEO Mike Lawrie have emerged as candidates, Reuters reported Tuesday.

Mulally has overseen a dramatic turnaround at Ford since joining in 2006, leading the company from a $12.6 billion net loss that year to $6.6 in profit in 2010. He's expected to stay on as Ford CEO until the end of 2014 as part of the company's succession plan.

In 2009, when Mulally was picked for the Time 100 list of the world's most influential people, Ballmer himself wrote the description, noting that Mulally "understands the fundamentals of business success as well as any business leader I know."

Daniel Duffy, CEO of Valley Network Solutions, a Fresno, Calif.-based Microsoft partner, believes Mulally would be "an exceptional fit" for the CEO job at Microsoft. "He's got a proven track record of success, and he's technical," Duffy said in an email.

Some industry watchers think Microsoft will choose a new CEO from outside the company. But if it picks a CEO from outside the technology industry, that might not go over well with employees.

Microsoft's top leadership wants a CEO "who can gain the respect of the engineering teams. They really do not want to accelerate the loss of talent there," a source with knowledge of the matter told CRN last month.

Lawrie also spent a year as a general partner at ValueAct Capital, the activist investor upon which Microsoft has seen fit to bestow a seat on its board of directors, presumably to avoid a messy proxy fight.

Lawrie started his career at IBM in 1977, and spent 27 years there, working for many years with John Thompson, CEO of Virtual Instruments and lead director of the special committee that's been tasked with finding Ballmer's successor.